Quite Unexpectedly the Top Blew Off

 

In one of those cosmic ironies that fall out of the sky and remind you to value those things you have over the potentialities that you don't have, Winnifred was struck by a car this morning and killed. Boom, just like that, right in front of the house.

The driver knocked on the door, and then tactfully disappeared when I ran upstairs to get dressed (I was still drinking morning coffee). She had at least appeared to be genuinely shocked and saddened to find out it was my cat (I think she was hoping it was some unloved stray).

Fred was probably chasing a squirrel -- I had watched her hunting one in the neighbor's yard across the street not five minutes earlier.  She was so excited to be out and about, after having been penned up in the house for 20 hours while we hoped Tasha might come home.  She had early greeted Mater and me over coffee by rolling on the morning newspaper on the table, attacking the Editorial Section.  The car bumper hit her with a severe and direct blow to the head -- Fred did not probably even feel it.

A week or so ago, trying to remember the title of a Robert Frost poem about a wave hitting the shore, I came across this poem by Archibald MacLeish on the Internet.  I had recited it in High School -- went to State Finals with it, in fact -- as part of a typically teenaged view of "serious poetry"; my theme for recitation was The Apocalypse.  I hadn't thought of the poem for decades until last week, and I find today it is running through my consciousness.  It isn't the End of the World at Cattus Dommus -- instead,  the resonance is with the excited circus, like a calico's coloring and her pent-up energy, followed by the suddenness of nothingness.

Tasha is still missing, too.


The End of the World

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.

-- Archibald MacLeish

Ahem. Excuse me, Frederica. Winifred? Frieda?

(a bad photo, but good display of the cat's coloring)

It has been brought to my attention that most calico cats are female (that is, 2,999 out of 3,000 are). It's a genetic thing -- red and black colors (alleles) are carried at the same point on the X chromosome, and you need one of each allele. So you need two X's to get both the red (orange) and the black of a calico. White color apparently is thrown in for free, like that special watermarked tissue paper with the matching sticker that you get at the better clothing stores.

For those sticklers for statistics amongst my readers, that 1 in 3,000 male calico cat happens to have an extra sex chromosome (XXY). And only 1 in 10,000 of them are fertile, if that many.

Another fascinating feline fact is that all-red (orange) female cats are pretty rare, too. The red allele is recessive, so those girls need two red Xs, so to speak, to carry the color. Not tremendously rare, but not common.

Anyway, from statistics back to specifics. I had thought, before reading up on the subject tonight, that the all-female coloration rule only applied to "tortoiseshell" cats -- those murky, dark blend of colors that have no or very little white (as in this photo from the marvelous website forwarded to me by PeaceableKate, What Color Is My Cat?). It turns out, those are just cats without much white on them -- a "calico" is just the common name for a "Black Tortoiseshell with White", which in itself is a shorthand term for "Black with Red with White". (Calico is a US term, too, not used in the UK. I don't know about elsewhere.)

Our own pretty example has such a low and persuasive growl, and is built rather like a feline bulldog. And I've only owned male cats until Tasha turned up, so my default is male. And, if there are indeed 19,999 stray cats in Portland, there could be as many as 7 male calicos wandering about (were all those strays calicos). But I just checked (an unappreciated interruption in the pre-midnight nap), and we've got a girl. (Disturbingly, I couldn't find any spaying scars, either, so we may have more than one girl if we're not careful.)

Last but not least, I also learned tonight that calicos are considered "Lucky Cats", a.k.a. "Money Cats" -- said to bring safety to sailors and wealth to everybody else. I'd be fine with that.

Position Open -- Room and Board, Good Benefits

A week to the day after Jersey's ... departure, I heard a growl and a hiss. Moving to the window, I was in time to see Tasha plumped up twice her size in defensive guise, and a whiz of furzy blur that looked like the back leg and tail of a calico cat. We have no calico cats in the neighborhood, owned or otherwise, only a complete variety of black and white, or gray cats. Harry is the closest to multicolored, with his white and brown and golden and gray and black coat. Certainly no gingers.

The next night, in the wee hours, Harry cornered something fierce under the stairs just out my window. I went out to check. It was growling and hissing, making clear to any concerned that if you even thought about edging a paw under the bottom step, you'd be flayed alive by the huge, fanged monster currently in residence. Harry sat about 5 feet away on a bench, tensed but unconcerned, looking everywhere but at the stairs, as if he just happened to innocently arrive on the scene and had a hearing-location problem. I love cats.

I stood at a safe distance for about 5 minutes, keeping up a steady flow of inconsequential conversation in a casual voice. Suddenly the hissing stopped, and the savage under the stairs swooped out and ran to me like Richard Kimble chased into a church sanctuary by the US Marshall and his SWAT team. He wrapped himself around my ankles. Purr, purr, mew mew, love me, save me, care for me, take me home.

It was gratifying, to say the least. He is a short-haired intensely-hued calico, probably full grown but not a large cat, with a thick soft coat and a black spot on his nose. I petted him copiously, fed and watered him, and left him outside.


Two days later, he was sleeping in the tv room, which has doors to the outside, with a litter box, food, water and several fleece blankets to choose from for beds. And he stuck. He's been indoors now for 4 days and nights. His name was settled quickly on Fred, aka Fredness, aka Mr. Chubby Huggs (named for a cartoon character cat who lives to hug others).

He is one of the most mellow cats I've met, like Hobbes, unphased by hyperactive children, loud noises, or being taken to the vets. He sleeps most of the day, uninterested in leaving the comfort of his chair except for brief strolls around the garden or house, and playful moments with a mouse-toy. He reacts only to cats, and even them he's getting used to (but for the most part we have kept them all separate). The other cats are curious, but (aside from an occasional pounce from Tasha the House Protector) they mostly ignore him, even when he is hissing. He is socialized, playful, mostly well-groomed. We are debating how long he's been on the streets, because he's clearly lived with humans before. He's less a "stray" than a "lost" cat, and far far from "feral".

To be honest, we have not been jonny-on-the-spot with finding his presumed owners. We have looked for Lost Cat signs in the neighborhood (none), but we haven't posted any Found Cat signs yet. I did finally take him to the vet's yesterday to have him checked for a Microchip ID (a little computer chip shot under the surface of the skin, that allows the cat to be uniquely ID'd -- a form of Social Security Number, if you will). Fred has been living "off the grid" apparently, and is not 'chipped.

In the meantime, Girl-Child has announced he will be her cat, and she will feed and care for him, and when he's allowed further into the house he will sleep on her bed.

Cattus Dommus is in disarray these days (blog entry about that to come some day soon). It is a relief to have something we all can love unconditionally, who appears to unconditionally love us back, with no proving time. There's lots of sub-textual stuff about being lost, adrift and begging, and finding a comfortable home, and for the moment, we'll stall on determining where Fred is supposed to be sleeping. Ultimately, whether we find those other people, or he stays here, Fred has a home.